Girls came and went in my room. I liked it that way. I wanted the company-and the prosperous appearance of company. They taught me about Toll House cookies; Switzerland; the names of automobiles, shampoos, rock groups, Connecticut cities; casual shoes and outdoor-equipment catalogs. I learned that other girls, too, tired during sports, that their calf muscles, like mine, screamed out pain when they walked down the stairs. I learned about brands of tampons.
I learned that these girls thought their hair dirty when they did not wash it daily.
”I hear what you`re saying, but I just don`t see it. I`m looking at your hair, but I don`t see the grease.”
”Oh, my God, it`s, like, hanging down in clumps!” One girl pulled a few strands from her scalp to display the offending sheen. ”Look.”
I learned that their romanticized lusts sounded like mine felt, as did their ambivalent homesickness, and their guarded, girlish competitiveness.
As they came to sit and stay, however, differences emerged between us. Taken together, these girls seemed more certain than I that they deserved our good fortune.
They were sorry for people who were poorer than they, but they did not feel guilty to think of the resources we were sucking up-forests, meadows and ponds, the erudition of well-educated teachers, water for roaring showers, heat that blew out of opened windows everywhere, food not eaten but mixed together for disgusting fun after lunch.
They took it as their due. It was boot-camp preparation for America`s leaders, which we were told we would one day be. They gave no indication that they worried that others, smarter or more worthy, might, at that very moment, be giving up hope of getting what we had.
I did not, however, tell the girls what I was thinking. We did not talk about how differently we saw the world. Indeed my black and their white heritage was not a starting point for our relationship, but rather was the outer boundary.
I could not cross it, because there sprang up a hard wall of denial impervious to my inexperienced and insecure assault.
”Well, as far as I`m concerned,” one girl after another would say, ”it doesn`t matter to me if somebody`s white or black or green or purple. I mean people are just people.”
The motion, having been made, would invariably be seconded.
”Really. I mean, it`s the person that counts.”
Having castigated whites` widespread inability to see individuals for the skin in which they were wrapped, I could hardly argue with ”it`s the person that counts.”
I didn`t know why they always chose green and purple to dramatize their indifference, but my ethnicity seemed diminished when the talk turned to Muppets. It was like they were taking something from me.
”I`m not purple.” What else could you say?
”The truth is,” somebody said, ”I … this is so silly … I`m really embarrassed, but, it`s like, there are some things you, God, you just feel ashamed to admit that you think about this stuff, but I always kind of wondered if, like, black guys and white guys were, like, different. … ”
They shrieked with laughter. Sitting on the afghan my mother had crocheted for me in the school colors of red and white, their rusty-dusty feet all over my good afghan, they laughed and had themselves a ball.
”Now, see, that`s why people don`t want to say anything,” one girl said. ”Look, you`re getting all mad.”
”I`m not mad.”
”You look it.”
”I`m not mad. I don`t even know about any differences between white guys and black guys,” I said, deliberately avoiding the word ”boys.” (Black manhood seemed at stake. Everything seemed at stake.) Then I added as archly as possible: ”I don`t mess around with white boys.”
The party broke up soon after. I sat still, the better to control my righteous anger. It always came down to this, I thought, the old song of the South. I wanted something more meaningful. I wanted it to mean something that I had come 400 miles from home, and sat day after day with them in chapel, in class.
I wanted it to mean something that after Martin Luther King`s and Malcolm X`s assassinations, we kids sweated together in sports, ate together at Seated Meal, studied and talked together at night. It couldn`t just be that I was to become like them or hang onto what I`d been. It couldn`t be that lonely and pointless.
I looked across the quad to Jimmy`s room (a fellow student from Brooklyn), and waved. He was not in his room, but the mere sight of his lighted window brought me back to my purpose. It was not to run myself ragged trying to wrench some honesty out of this most disingenuous of God`s people. I had come to St. Paul`s to turn it out. How had I lost sight of the simple fact?
I worked harder the rest of the term than I had ever known I could work. I looked up more vocabulary words and wrote papers and practiced grammar. I worked and reworked trigonometry equations. I took to paraphrasing an old nun I`d once seen in a movie. She croaks at the girl whom the Virgin Mary has visited: ”I have read the words of our Lord God until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell. Why should God choose you?”
No longer convinced of the special brilliance I had once expected to discover in myself, no longer certain that my blackness gave me precocious wisdom, or that I could outslick these folks, I held onto that crazy old nun. They might be smarter than I or better prepared or more athletic. They might know the rules better, whatever the unspoken rules were for leaping to the top of the world and staying there. But I could work. I could read until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell!
I could outwork them all. Will, it seemed to me, was the only quality I had in greater abundance than my fellows, and I would will myself to work.
Examinations were the test of my resolve. During exams there were no more classes and no more sports, only studying, and for big stakes-exams were worth large fractions of our final grades. I felt the rush of pure competition. Studying distracted me from other people, thoughts, worries.
On vacation after the exams, I visited Karen and Ruthie, close friends from Yeadon High. They asked how St. Paul`s was, and whether I liked it. I wanted to answer them honestly. I wanted them to know how my life had changed so that we could sit down in the dim light of Karen`s living room and talk about it.
But I did not have enough words and time to make them see it and feel it with me, and besides, nobody, not even my best friends, cared as much about St. Paul`s as its students. Nobody else lived there. They lived, as we Paulies joked, in the real world.
”First of all, you`ve got to understand that teachers are all a little screwy. You`ve got to stay in a place like that for 20 years. These are the people who decided to opt out of real life at some point, and they are set loose on us 24 hours a day.
”OK? You got the picture? There is no escape from these people. They are out to improve you: how you read, how you write, how you think. You see what I mean about no escape?”
Later, I figured, when I understood the school better, then I could talk to them seriously about it. For now, I wanted to make them laugh. I wanted to entertain. I didn`t dare risk being boring or snobbish or crybabyish about my new school. I didn`t want to lose them.
Each time we began a new subject, I needed them to fill me in on facts. … I didn`t know what they`d just read in English, or who had sung the solos in this year`s ”Messiah,” or what prank Bob Bailey had pulled in science lab. Too much exposition weighed down our conversation.
We couldn`t anticipate each other anymore, or jump back and forth between subjects until we landed in intimate territory. I was with my friends, but I could not get the full pleasure of them. I wanted to weep with frustration.
Two nights before we returned to school, I stayed up by myself drinking my mother`s Christmas liqueur late into the night. I decided to level with myself. My new friends and I knew one another`s daily routines, but we had no history-and no future, I thought-when we all went back to our real lives.
But back in real life, Karen and Ruthie and I, once past the memories, had to work hard just to keep talking. At my own house I felt as if I were fighting for a new position in the family order, while Mama pretended not to notice and Dad maybe didn`t notice for real. Everywhere I went I felt out of place. The fact was that I had left home in September gleeful and smug. I took it as divine justice that now I felt as if I no longer belonged anywhere.
Lorene Cary graduated from St. Paul`s in 1974. In 1982, she returned for a year, to teach.
The faculty that had appeared to my teenage eyes as a monolith of critical white adulthood now revealed itself as a community of idealists, all trying, each according to his or her ability, to help young people. Our job, it sometimes seemed, was to stuff as much Christian charity into our arrogant charges as possible before the world began rewarding them so richly for being so beautiful, charming and accomplished (which we helped them become).
I felt the zeal of it, the ironic, subversive missionary zeal. I felt the frustration. Like the kids, I stayed up too late. I accepted too many assignments.
Like the other faculty members, I exerted too much pressure on my already-stress-filled students. Without words, I exuded it like sweat from my pores. No doubt they could smell it on my skin as I bent over their shoulders to point out how they could improve their theses on the third rewrite.
And yet it took all my control to keep from shaking them sometimes, from jacking them up against the wall and screaming into their faces: ”Look at what you have here. Buildings, grounds, books, computers, experts, time, youth, strength, ice rinks, forests, radio equipment, observatories. Learn, damn you! Take it in and go out into the world and do something.”
One afternoon I sat with a student from Japan, listening as she translated into her own language a passage from the ”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” a book that I had added, with my department chairman`s permission, to my Fourth-Formers` readings in American literature.
Mochi giggled, at first, to hear Douglass` abolitionist bombast coming from her lips, in her language. I asked her to reread the paragraph. Again and again she repeated the words.
Her voice changed, and her face changed, and I could hear Douglass`
passion. The language became transparent for a moment, like the words of an opera.
She spoke to me with her voice and her eyes and her body. I felt a jolt of love for this hardworking girl-and, in its wake, a hard knot of feeling toward the black girl who had traveled here from Yeadon 10 years before.
